My thoughts on the chain blade talent

Alright y'all, long post in awhile, and I figured I might share a few thoughts on this talent, good and bad and the ones in between.

First, to give my background, I'm a human that's heavily invested into archery in terms of gear, though all my other gears are finished now as well and I have all my skills and talents capped, except finishing Dan tests and Grandmasters.

So looking at the talent with that background, it felt good to use it. Good but not overpowering.

To start off, with my combat gear and no buff, I get 1090 max with the basic chain blade currently with shit enchants. I'm pleasantly surprised by this number because the main weapon I use, which are my bhafel combos, reach me upto 1079. While the noticeable increase in max seems pretty at first, I also quickly realized it doesn't mean it's more powerful, and there may be a good reason why the devCats gave such a high scaling to this skillset.

Going into the skills, first off, you have to fill the dorcha gauge, which you can do with regular attacks or dorcha snatch. The AoE from this skill set sound real juicy. High multipliers with basically no CD? But the downside is the dorcha cost, that has to be filled with rather non high DPS ways. From the way I see it, this skill set doesn't seem that spammable for a really quick clear, and in my opinion it's best to be used when dorcha conversion is up.

For the most important skills, it seems to me that chain sweep and spinning slash seem to be the priorities as they provide the best AoE clears. While chain impale and chain crush both seem to provide high multipliers, they don't really seem worth using as many other skills seem to be more spammable with higher multipliers within given time (Magnum Shot, Bash, FH, etc). Rest of the skills I haven't gotten around to using them much yet, but death mark stands out to me, wonder if it can apply damage bonus to other skill sets too. Anchor rush seems to be the most useless just because many other blinks/dash exist in the game already. If you do get stunned, it seems better to just summon pets, and then use other AoE skills to clear rather than spending time to use anchor rush.

All in all, it seems to be an ok AoE skill set that has its moments and a good stat booster for archery users, but that's it for me. Pretty ok.

For a skillset, it does actually extremely good damage, even without specializing in it.

What bothers me is how you fill the gauge up, with normal attacks. If you're gonna spend docha, might as well spend it on the AOEs...

But I will hold full judgment back because we haven't got the full skillset yet. We're missing 3, like Bachram explosion.

So I am going to wait until I see what it does.

Now aside from the way you gather dorcha, the animation and gameplay feels very fluid. The skills feel great to use and it is visually appealing to me.

Edit: If collecting Dorcha was more convenient or even if Dorcha mastery has like: 50% of not consuming Dorcha, that would be great. Heck, I rather Dorcha be something similar to Reload compared to hitting things to gain.

Last edited by Kenero; 12-15-2017 at 03:53 AM.

Kenero of Mari Server.

Royal Alchemist, streaming it through and living relaxed.

"Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us." - Stephen Colbert

Agreed qaccy. It's a fun skill set but from the first times I was using it, it seemed to have a long recovery with how long the skills took to animate. Granted, that's solved by using AoE pets but still.

Also,

Nexon why

Damn them for giving you 4 options at the end with Eiren. I normally have an alt get the second option with choices but now I might have to do 3 more depending on how much I want to read the other dialogue?! Fucking A man. Also feel bad for taking all of her powers, but at least she won't hurt her buddies anymore.

You fools would dare to challenge the king of light and darkness? So you choose to do and so you shall feel my wrath!

It's a pretty distinct talent. The skills look fun but they don't really patch any holes in the combat system.

I would love for AOE pets to get nerfed with mana use on summon and for silly shit like Final Hit, Bash, Vision of Ladeca, and a plethora of aggro stuff but it's too late in the game to question balance.

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It's nice to finally see some fucking movement from DevCat. Roughly three years have passed since I last played and barely anything has changed in that time. Let's hope this recent effort continues.

I like it so far, but I am not a min-maxer, I just think it's fun to play.

Does anyone have advice for what skills you should put on the hotkey bar for immediate use? Like, normally I set all of my talents to have defense, counter, and windmill at least, but, I wonder if I should remove one of them to make room for more easily pressing the Chain Slash skills... It's hard for me to press the whole hotkey bar, so keys 1-6 are the only ones I can use immediately without delay.

I came back to mabinogi to cap these skills, played about a week or two after a pretty long hiatus (currently resuming said hiatus). I'm in a similar situation as ironwoman (human archer, max every skill, alright enchants/set, about 1k to 1.1k max attack). I was somewhat surprised to see that a number of the skills were "somewhat" hard to obtain (in that you couldn't just rebirth to get them or get them all from the main questline). The process of training them was a lot easier than I anticipated. At first it seemed slow, but considering you can train a lot of them at once, it took no time to max them all. With that said, most of the skills aren't very useful. I found only a few gems out of the bunch.

Considering my best gear revolves around archery and melee, the area that I found chain blades to excel with AoE damage. I think it was Chain Sweep that I used the most. Considering you get dorcha using other skillsets (melee/archery for example) it's not too difficult to use your other skillsets and then switch or to land a few consecutive hits with your chain blade before unleashing an AoE strike. Granted, I didn't run like Phantasm or anything- instead I focused on Baltane elite missions and elite shadow missions. Lastly, I found the regular attacks offered by chain blades to be great for wiping out enemies that can die in 1-2 hits. They're fast, have great reach, can't miss, don't need to reload, and grant lots of dorcha.

All in all, good but not OP. Against singular targets with high hp, I wouldn't doubt that other skillsets would be easier. Also, considering the use of dorcha it's better as a secondary class OR at least with another good go-to class like melee for when engagements are either too close or you need to replenish your dorcha while still dishing out dps.

Well after hearing that some of my favorite life skills were going to get uncapped, I suddenly found myself with renewed interest in Mabinogi. Now cause my gear is pretty much non existant at this point I won't have much to go with when I do start getting into using the chain skills aside from my own raw stats.

That being said, so far I'm enjoying the questline that comes with this quite a bit. I'm quite fond of the Aces and am really glad they are being put to good use. If only they were used more often. The skillset itself seems rather interesting. I won't be able to fully give my opinion on it though for awhile as ranking it up will take some time, even with the AP training that's in the game now.